The Great Agricultural Riches Of Ancient Native America | 1491: America Before Columbus | Timeline

This channel is part of the History Hit Network. Stick around to find out more. We are the first peoples of the Americas. We have been here from the beginning. Our ancestors navigated by the wind and stars, crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges, searching for new lands. Over thousands of years, our ancestors became astronomers and architects, philosophers and scientists, artists and inventors. We created distinct societies and built vast trade systems that covered two continents. In 1492, our world was changed forever. But we did not disappear. Today, the languages and teachings of our ancestors remain. And these are the untold stories of the Americas before Columbus. Throughout history, people in every part of the world hunted, fished and gathered wild plants for survival. Over time, these foods became a central part of the cultural identity of each nation. In the Americas, our ancestors harvested fish, seals and whales, and hunted mammoth, bison and other animals. And we adapted more species of wild grasses, vegetables and fruit than anywhere else on Earth. But no single food has had a greater influence on the history of our ancestors than maize. For thousands of years, maize has permeated every aspect of Maya culture, from the practical to the spiritual. Not only is maize the foundation of their creation stories, it is the heart and soul of the Maya civilization. In Maya oral and written history, the gods created the first humans from cornmeal after attempts to make people out of mud and wood fail. The maize god was referred to as the first father, and the maize goddess is associated with fertility, the moon and new corn. Maize appears in the most sacred of Maya ceremonies and in the simplest acts of everyday life. Maize has nourished and inspired the Maya people for close to 4,000 years. It really is a very integral part of people's lives, everyday life, from, you know, again, providing them with nutrition, but also spiritually it's really important. I mean, this is what has shaped people's lives and the history of people, culture. Not only does it include, you know, our beliefs about creation, for example, it has allowed people to survive to this day. The Maya people didn't actually develop the maize plant. That honor goes to the indigenous farmers in the Balsas Valley in Mexico, who initiated one of the world's earliest forms of agriculture by cultivating a wild grass known as teosinte, which became the maize we know today. After each growing season, farmers selected the plants with the most desirable attributes and planted their kernels. In looking at the evolution of maize, we have a history here, beginning with teosinte, that extends back some 8,000 years. Maize could well be the first act of genetic engineering in human history. Between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago, maize had traveled to the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America. We begin to find maize moving over these ancient routes early on, so we know that foodstuffs were critical. Maize was also easy to transport and store, which the Maya used to their advantage. Considering the importance of corn for people's diet, I'm sure it was a valuable commodity, valuable food to trade. How do you get those products when you yourself don't grow maize? You trade these, you trade shell, you trade obsidian, and you get the product. As the Mayan population grew, so did the need to generate food on an industrial scale. We're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial and timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. One method used by the Mayans to mass-produce maize was known as slash and burn. So that would mean that, you know, you live in an area, you cut down the forest, you grow corn, and then after a while that soil might not be able to provide for you anymore. So you move on to another place and you cut it down and do the same thing. Other agricultural methods were adopted as well, including stepped terrace farming along hillsides and raised farm beds in marshes. They would take weeds or plants growing in the water, they would mound them as a source of nutrients. Crop diversification was also essential to the health of both the people and the land itself. And maize was grown alongside chili peppers, squash and beans. Corn, it requires a lot of nutrients. And so beans is actually a plant that provides nitrogen into the soil. So the beans help the corn to grow. You obviously need to have these crops grow together so they provide for each other or help one another to grow better. By using a variety of methods for growing maize, the Maya developed intricate agricultural infrastructures in Mesoamerica. As maize spread throughout the Americas, it contributed to the development and growth of the Inca, Aztec, ancestral Pueblo, and many other indigenous civilizations. As Mesoamerican civilizations rose and fell over the millennia, there is one thing that remained constant, the central role that maize held in the diet, traditions and mythology of the people. Today, maize is one of the world's most widely grown crops. Its development remains one of the most impressive acts of agricultural achievement. 10,000 years ago, people in three different regions in the world were domesticating wild vegetables and grains. Rice in China, wheat in the Middle East, and maize in central Mexico were three founding crops. Rice was first cultivated in China and grown on terraced hillsides. In classical Chinese languages, the word for agriculture is the same as the word for rice. Wheat was first cultivated in Mesopotamia and is thought to be the first grain to be domesticated by humans. 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians made the first bread by adding yeast to wheat flour. Maize was first cultivated in Mexico and within 8,000 years had spread to every part of South America and much of North America. Maize can be ground into a flour, the cobs burned as a fuel, and the husks woven into mats and baskets. Today, rice, wheat and maize are three of the most widely grown crops in the world. The potato is to the Andean region of South America what maize is to Mesoamerica, a stable source of food and essential to the cultural identity of the people. Unlike corn, the potato grows at high altitudes and can be left in the ground for a year or more. The potato was first cultivated between 8 and 10,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca, which straddles the borders of Peru and Bolivia. Over time, indigenous farmers created more than 5,000 varieties of potato, each with its own unique flavor and color. From the Andean point of view, color is also important for these people because each kind of potato has a social role. The planting of everything in the Andes has a powerful ritual. It's very entangled with many things that they are doing all the time. The communities, the real communities in the Andean highlands, they don't get the distinction between the ritual, political or economic things. For these people, it's almost the same. The planting of the potato each season was accompanied by prayers performed by priests. Farmers carried out a planting ritual that involved the men breaking the ground and the women planting the potatoes. The potato is especially adaptable to the climates of the Andes, as it grows well in the cooler, higher mountain ecosystem. Using the agricultural process of terrace farming, the Andean people sculpted the sides of mountains to create flat sections of land to grow potatoes and other crops. Like maize, potatoes were hardy and easy to transport. But unlike maize, which traveled from Mesoamerica to South America soon after its development, the potato did not arrive in Mexico until about 500 years ago. From there, it was traded with other indigenous communities and eventually made its way to the northwest coast of North America and as far north as Alaska. Cultures in Mexico, along the western coast of Mexico, all had potatoes in some way or another. It's only when you get into the United States region that potatoes start to completely disappear. And yet they reappear up in Washington and in Oregon, simply called Tlingit or Tlingit potatoes. There are old potatoes. They're the ones that everybody used to have before we got these big ones. A potato research lab in Wisconsin sequenced the genes of the Kassan potato and the Tlingit Maria's potato, and they found that the nearest relatives of them were the Ozette potato that was known from the Makah area and Ozette on the outer coast of Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Then the next nearest relatives are in Mexico. It remains a mystery as to how long potatoes have been grown along the northwest coast of North America. The earliest explorers said explicitly that they saw people with gardens in the northern northwest coast. It could have been the very earliest Spanish ships that introduced this, but it's hard to see because the Spanish didn't spend very much time up in Tlingit country. They came, they named things, they stopped, said hello in Yakutat, and then left. I'm of the opinion that these are probably pre-European. If potatoes that originated in Mexico reached the west coast of North America before the arrival of European seafarers, how did they make the journey to Alaska? If we know that a couple of young Tlingit men could paddle all the way down from Wrangell in southeast Alaska to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, there's no reason that people wouldn't have traveled as far south as California to pick up potatoes and bring them north. And what's more extraordinary is that in the intervening centuries, we've maintained the exact same potato line and I have it growing back at home. Maize and potatoes were integral to the ancient economies of the Americas and are still vital components of the world's food supply today. Drying and storing plants and vegetables offered ancient peoples a year-round food supply and valuable trade products. Coffee is one of the world's most popular beverages, but its ancient history remains a mystery. It originally grew wild in Ethiopia and about 500 years ago, coffee beans were being exported to northern Africa and Europe. Tea traces its origins to medicinal use by the emperors of China. It eventually became a popular beverage throughout Asia and the world. Potatoes were first cultivated in raised gardens in the high altitudes in Peru and Bolivia. Inca farmers developed a dried potato product called chimu that could be stored for more than a year. Tea, coffee and potatoes were an important part of ancient diets and economies and they still are today. The population in Amazonia before 1491 numbered in the millions. People lived in small coastal villages as well as large cities along the tributaries of the Amazon River. The wild plants and small game that were harvested from the rainforest could not sustain this growing population. Indigenous people needed to find a way to produce high-yield plants. Plant domestication is as old here as it is in places like China or Mesopotamia. But these guys, these people here in the New World, they were like domesticated with squash very early, chili peppers and then maize, corn. And we know there are many Amazonian plants like cacao, for instance, that were so domesticated in the Amazon. For thousands of years, people living in the Amazon River basin have practiced a form of agriculture that led to the development of dozens of varieties of vegetables and fruits. Unlike potatoes and maize, this type of plant cultivation didn't involve the intensive clearing of traditional-style farming. Instead, they practiced agroforestry, which is the mixing of wild and cultivated fruits, vegetables and nuts in a forested environment. These people, they're eating a lot of corn, for instance, but they're also eating palms and Brazil nuts. Technically, they're wild plants. They're not domesticated. But, I mean, they didn't become farmers. They were generalist hunter-gatherers that had domesticated plants in their backyards for thousands of years. Unlike the farming practices in Mesoamerica and the Andes, agroforestry required less intensive labor to prepare the land and harvest the crops. So, traditionally, how would an archaeologist look at this? That archaeologist would say, well, these people, they were incipient farmers. Traditionally, how scientists would look at that, oh, these guys are backwards. They're not farmers. They haven't achieved. They haven't climbed to another step or another layer. In cultural evolution, that's a false premise. If you look at the evidence today, we see that these were stable lifestyles. Agroforestry was as innovative and productive as farming methods used elsewhere in the Americas. Each type of environment demanded different approaches to agriculture. Normally, places where farming become more important, in the beginning, there were places where there was scarcity of resources. Places like Caral, for instance, it's a small river valley surrounded by desert, very dry desert, and the mountains. Whereas, if you look at places where resources were abundant, like the Amazon or the Northwest Coast, there was no pressure for these people to become farmers. And that idea that farming necessarily is a change for the better is a modern idea that's been applied from Western Europe. But in areas which are covered by tropical rainforests, I think we're dealing with different strategies. The Amazonian record really helped us to rethink things that we take for granted. In the Amazon, we see this context of abundance, so much protein in the waters, in the rivers, but also lots of plant diversities. Better strategies work based on diversification. If you look at the biological data, it's one of the most biologically diversified places in the world. So it's only natural that people who are living there were aware of that. Fruits, vegetables, and grains such as squash, beans, and quinoa, cultivated in South America thousands of years ago, are now widely distributed throughout the world. You can look at the forest as a library. There's so much information there. And to be able to classify, understand, and actually find a way to use all those resources, it's a very sophisticated knowledge. A constant source of abundance, the Amazon remains one of the most biologically diverse places in the world. Among the first tree crops to be cultivated by humans were apples in Asia, olives in the Middle East, and peach palms in South America. The wild ancestors of olives grew throughout Mesopotamia. They later spread to the Mediterranean region and northern Africa, where they were domesticated and grown for cooking in lamp oil, fruit, and wood. The domestication of wild apples first took place in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Farmers planted apple trees in orchards and over time cultivated new varieties of the fruit. Peach palm trees are a wild plant that developed into an important cultivated tree in Amazonia. The tree eventually spread throughout South America, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica through human intervention. Today, apples, olives, and peach palms are an important source of food throughout the world. Thousands of kilometers north of the Amazon is another major rainforest, the Pacific Northwest. Like the Amazon, the vegetation and waterways provide such a diversity of flora and fauna that indigenous people had little need to engage in large-scale farming. One of the few exceptions is camas. The nutritious bulb of this purple-flowered plant was a significant part of the Coast Salish diet. While it grows wild, it became an important food source and trade item through long-term cultivation. The women who had the role and responsibility to manage these food systems, they knew all the different things that needed to be done, the burning that had to take place in the fall, and managing the areas where the camases can be harvested, all the different other plants that needed to be taken care of throughout the year and harvested as well. The process of cultivation used by Coast Salish women to grow camas was a hybrid between farming techniques seen in Mesoamerica and the Andes and agroforestry found in the Amazon. It's not running lines and dropping seeds in a row. It's harvesting the camas when they're in seed and turning the soil, selecting the bulbs you're going to take, putting them back, the ones you're not going to take. You're dropping the seed just before you're putting the final bits of soil back down. They maintain their plots through regular clearing and controlled burns. Camas was cooked for 24 hours or more to break down the bulb's crystalline fibers into a digestible sugar. Once cooked, camas was mixed with berries, flattened, and dried into a fruit leather. It was cooked with other foods or dried and ground into a flour. I would say, if anything, it might be close to a parsnip but have a consistency of a sweet potato. They wouldn't be here if the women didn't manage these food systems in a way that sustained the community. Like the maize of Mesoamerica and the potatoes of the Andes, camas holds practical, spiritual, and cultural significance for the Coast Salish peoples. I know when me and my family go out, we harvest camas and we do pit cooks. It's a whole different kind of conversation that takes part. We're talking in a different way that you normally wouldn't be at your dinner table. We're connecting to the land. We're connecting to the food. And all of these memories come up of what we've been taught about our history. We start talking about the history of the area we're harvesting. We're talking about the food. We're talking about the stories that come within our ancestral lands and within the food system as well. I imagine when I'm there how it must have been for our ancestors to have that kind of conversation and to connect to the food and remind everyone that we're still a part of this food system. In addition to their agricultural achievements, Indigenous people throughout the Americas developed innovative ways to fish and hunt. The Arctic region of North America has been home to a succession of Indigenous cultures over the past 5,000 years. They found ways to survive the harsh winter climate without the advantage of wood, stone or clay to build houses. The primary source of food for the Tule, Dorset, Inuit and other Northern peoples was the sea. Inuit all across the North survived mainly because of one animal and that animal is the seal. We would travel mostly out on the sea ice hunting seals all winter because that's what we lived on, seals. The traditional way was to use a harpoon because, you know, the seals are very wary but apparently they don't see very well, you know, when they're out of the water and they have to come up, you know, because, you know, they have to breathe and they come up and they have these holes. They sun themselves really close to their holes so they can just dive down when, you know, when we or polar bears come. A successful seal hunt depended on patience, skill and cunning. In the spring when all the snow was gone from, you know, the ice, we would have to crawl basically on the sea ice pretending to be a seal, you know, until we got close enough to go and harpoon it. We had all these implements that we used to detect when they were coming up to see when the water was going up, you know, up and down when the seal swam under or came up, you know, and took a breath. We used dogs to sniff them out and then we would use a harpoon to catch a seal. We study the animals that we hunt so that we can outsmart them but we're also very grateful to them for supplying us with, you know, what we eat. In a region where people lived off the land for months at a time, hunters used every part of the animal. Every part of the seal was used. We ate the meat, of course, and then we used skins, you know, mostly for what we call kamik, which are seal skin boots and they're warm, they're waterproof and they're very comfortable to wear. We used the fat to burn in our kudlaks which are like a half-moon-shaped lamps, you know, to cook with and to heat our igloos with and the fat from the seal was pounded to, you know, release all the oil and that's what we burned. We eat seal, we eat whale, we eat caribou. We not only hunt them but we also thank them for supplying us with all this food and our survival. Weighing more than 30 tons and measuring 15 meters, the largest animal in the sea would be a formidable challenge for any fisherman. For the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth nations in the northwest region of North America, the hunting of whales was more than an exercise in man's superiority over animals. It was a way of life. Whales are central to our identities as Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah peoples. In our oral traditions, we say we were whalers from the day we were created. With the archaeological evidence, in both Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah territory, demonstrate a connection to whaling for over 5,000 years. That's from the whale bones they've collected from whale in the middens showing that it was a major food product. The whale bones were used as part of the equipment and tools that we utilized. The whaling culture permeated every part of these nations' lifestyles, from trade, to ceremony, to art. You grow up knowing that you come from whaling, from Tikin, from the Thunderbird, who gave Ihtup, the whale, to us with the Ihtlik, with the sea serpent. And you see it everywhere. I mean, it's in our songs, it's in our dances, it's in our artwork. That's how we keep that whaling culture alive. In the springtime, when our foods were being depleted, that's when we would hunt the whales in the early spring when they were going up through their migration pattern up to Alaska. Whales contributed to over 70% of the food in our diet, especially in our early spring, because whale meat, oil, and fat had major nutritional benefits. Within the Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah nations was a distinct hierarchy that dictated the role of each person in the whale hunt. The chiefs were the people who whaled, so the chiefs were the ones who basically had the rights to the whale products, to the whale meat, oil, and fat. The oil itself was a very highly prized trade item. It was traded up and down the coast and to some interior communities as well. The Taiyi Hawif, which is the highest chief, would ultimately oversee the distribution. He and his family would keep the choice pieces of the whale, and the Chukwisi, which is the dorsal fin, which is where the spirit of the whale lives. They would have prayers conducted for four days after that to show the respect of that spirit, and when that spirit left, the Chukwisi, the dorsal fin, would stay with that chief. The rest of the whale would be distributed according to status in that community, so to the next chief in line and the next chief, or it would be distributed in this larger potlatch to invited guests from other communities. But for the Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah peoples, the whale hunt represented far more than a source of food. A lot of people don't understand this when they look at whaling, especially in the idea of what it meant to kill something, the killing of a whale, because they miss and they misconstrue that spiritual, emotional, psychological connection that we have to whales. We wouldn't put whales on our walls if we didn't revere them, if we didn't respect them, if they weren't central to who we were, if it was just a matter of killing something for food. It went beyond that, and how you understand that is by looking at the prayers, the certain rituals that were conducted, not just by the whaler, by the entire whaling crew, but especially the whaler's wife. Many people say, and it's passed down through the oral record, as well as anthropological research conducted on whaling, the whaler's wife, the Hakum, which is a woman of high status in our language, she had a special and intimate connection to the whale, the whale that was being sought. And it was believed that if that whale came to the boat and gave itself, which is ultimately what we believe, that we're not killing the whale, it's providing, that spirit of the whale is giving itself to those whalers, to that whaling chief. It's giving itself to her. So she has some of the most important rituals to observe, and especially when the whaling crew leaves, she cannot move because it believes that her spirit is connecting to the whaling spirit. So if she moves, she could make that whaling spirit unruly. She could cause the whale to leave. She could cause the whale to hurt the whaling crew. So she lays very still in her home, in her longhouse, while the crew is out seeking the whale. And even after they catch the whale, the whale will calm if it is connected to her spirit. The whaler's wife, even though she is not out on the water, she is ultimately the most important and central figure in that whale hunt because that whale is connecting to her. One of the largest land mammals to be hunted by our ancestors was the buffalo, also known as the American bison. In the central region of North America, the buffalo has been an important source of meat, hide and fat for indigenous people for more than 10,000 years. Right from the end of the Ice Age, people were already hunting bison, but they were extinct. They were hunting the extinct forms of bison. At three meters tall and a thousand kilograms each, these extinct bison would have towered over a hunter. Very early on, we see that people are already focusing a lot of their energies on this one species. Thousands of years before the introduction of the modern horse to the Americas, the buffalo would have been an imposing target for even the hardiest of hunters on foot. Right after the Ice Age, the way that communal hunting worked was you'd have a small group of hunters, for example, maybe six or seven hunters, and they'd ambush a small herd of bison, like perhaps a dozen. They did herd in small herds, but the large mass of herds that we hear about in the historic period became more gregarious as they grew smaller in size. About 2,000 years ago, bison hunting on the plains went through a dramatic transformation. Instead of small hunting parties going after a few bison, there were suddenly hundreds of people working together to chase herds of bison over cliffs or into natural or man-made traps. This form of hunting required large numbers of people to hunt, process the meat in hides, and transport it all back through the settlements. They would get as much as they could as fast as they can. And then, of course, the carcasses will start to be less good for human consumption. But they're still good for animals such as plains grizzlies or wolves or coyotes, even things such as turkey vultures and California condors would have a big feast at the buffalo jump after the people have taken their share and gone away. Rather than being a waste of buffalo, it's a part of the food chain on the prairies. Besant Valley in south-central Saskatchewan was where the first site was discovered, and it looked like they lured a herd of bison into a corral and then butchered them in there. But the buffalo jump wasn't the only significant discovery made at the Besant Valley site. They also had created a structure that was in architectural form very similar to what we would later on recognize as a Sundance Lodge. So this idea of the Sundance and the invention of the buffalo jump come together at the same time almost. In fact, earlier archaeologists on the plains noted this connection and speculated that people congregated for the ritual and that the buffalo jump was a byproduct of that. Other people would say that the buffalo jump brought people together and the ritual context was a byproduct of that. There is another theory about the sudden increase in large-scale buffalo hunting. Several large cities on the Mississippi River, including Cahokia, were important centers of continental trade. Indigenous people traveled thousands of kilometers from every part of North America to trade goods in these cities. The market for buffalo meat had expanded and so it was an economic solution was to import more buffalo meat from the plains, which meant that the people on the plains could harvest a whole herd of bison, take as much as they can for their own consumption, but also enough for a surplus that they could trade. And so this led to a cycle of dependence between those two communities. Fish and seafood have always been a part of the human diet. People in different parts of the world invented tools and fishing techniques to improve the success of the harvest. The Egyptians invented a variety of copper and bronze fishing hooks that they used to harvest fish in the Nile River and its tributaries. In southern France, harpoons were carved out of deer antlers and used to capture fish and seals in rivers and seas. One of the oldest fishing weirs in the world was discovered under 120 meters of water near Haida Gwaii. The stone weir confirms that people lived along the coastline of North America before the end of the last ice age. Fishing tools developed thousands of years ago are still in use in many parts of the world today. Rivers, lakes and oceans have always been an important source of food for Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. The discovery of an underwater stone fishing weir in Haida Gwaii and a village site near Bella Bella, dating back more than 14,000 years, reinforces claims that our ancestors lived along the Pacific West Coast long before there was an interior route into the Americas after the ice age ended. Since that time, the waterways have provided protein in the form of fish, shellfish and a variety of sea mammals. The Fraser River in Canada is the largest single salmon run in the world, with millions of fish making their way from the Pacific Ocean up the Fraser's many tributaries to spawn each year. There was an understanding that the migrating fish would be shared by the many nations living along the ocean and interior rivers and lakes. The Saanich people were often called the saltwater people because much of our traditional territory was marine environment. Salmon are still one of the most important foods. The salmon that we did catch because we caught them in the marine environment were much better quality than when they reached the river. Our salmon was prized and we would often travel to the river to trade with those people for the things that we needed. So there was a traditional economy there as well. Salmon is not only an important food and trade item, it's also part of the mythology, art and culture of the region's many nations. Indigenous peoples in the Northwest had both personal and community ceremonies to honour the salmon that they harvested for food. When the first sockeye was caught, it was the first salmon ceremony. It was the children who greeted the salmon at the shore and brought the salmon back to the community. In our thinking, the children were very pure, so the most appropriate people to bring the salmon back. And they would carry the salmon back to the community, but carrying it like a baby, I've been told. And we've started to bring that ceremony back as well over the last number of years. While the tradition was different for each nation, in each case, the salmon was honoured for returning to spawn and feeding the people for another year. Of the many species of salmon found in the waterways off the Northwest coast, one has stood out from the rest. The most important salmon in our traditional times and even today was the sockeye salmon. We don't have any sockeye spawning rivers in our territory. But the sockeye travel through our territory on the way to the Fraser to spawn. So we needed fishing technology that would be capable of catching those salmon in the marine environment. Methods used by Indigenous peoples to harvest salmon from the ocean and rivers included nets, traps, weirs, hooks and harpoons. Some speared fish from platforms they built over the river. Others made conical fish traps, three-pronged spears and dip nets made from willow and alder. One example of that is the development of the reef net technology for the Strait Salish people. These reef nets were traditionally capable of catching, you know, thousands of fish. And I think the capability was there to catch them all if we wanted to. But the idea of conservation was already part of that system. We would actually, in traditional times, would weave in a ring of willow in the end of the, in the bunt end of the reef net to allow some of the salmon to escape. Not because it was just an act of conservation, but it was also because of a belief and a worldview that the salmon that were our relatives and that the salmon traveling together were family lineages. Salmon had two names. They had a common name and they also had a prayer name. And those prayer names referred to those salmon as, they were using kinship terms, praying and speaking to the salmon as if they're relatives. So if we allow some of the salmon to escape, then those families will continue to, to perpetuate themselves into the future and that they would be able to come back to us year after year. While our practices might've looked primitive, that was only because we used everything that was found in our, in our natural environments. But I think the key thing behind it was also the worldview and the belief system that upheld all of those traditional technologies. And that's what really made it sustainable. Over thousands of years, the first peoples of the Americas developed techniques to hunt migrating animals and to fish from abundant oceans and waterways. Innovations in agriculture in the Americas through the domestication of wild plants was a turning point for our ancestors. We cleared forests and terraced mountainsides to grow crops. We built towns and cities near farmlands. And like the animals we hunted, the plants we cultivated influenced our traditions and beliefs. But the greatest impact of agricultural and hunting innovation was not realized until 1491, when the indigenous population in the Americas was in the tens of millions. This was a feat that could only have been achieved by a people who had mastered the art and science related to fishing, hunting, and plant cultivation.